At times on Tune-Yards’ latest album, “I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life,” the melodies and rhythms are so fantastic, so likely to set feet or hips in motion, that it’s easy to overlook the words Merrill Garbus is singing.

But that would be a mistake, for Garbus, who brings the appealing off-kilter indie rock of Tune-Yards to Los Angeles and Pomona on Thursday, Oct. 18 and Friday, Oct. 19, is a particularly thoughtful songwriter, whose lyrics touch on subjects from feminism to racial identity, freedom to social justice on this recent release.

“I guess a lot of things that have been themes of Tune-Yards continue to be,” Garbus says from her home in Oakland during a break from her tour last week. “For better or for worse I tend to have not an identity crisis, but a crisis of faith about my value as a musician, or the value of music and my music.

“That tends to happen every album, a kind of re-examination of why am I doing this, and am I sure that I want to do this,” she says. “A lot has been an examination of my influences, so many of them being music from the African diaspora and music from black America.”

It’s that point, emerging along with such movements as Black Lives Matter and the ongoing outcry over police violence toward black men, that Garbus, a white, New England expat to Oakland, do a deep dive into her understanding and awareness of race in songs such as the new album track “Colonizer,” she says.

“I think my experience of being white in this country, almost 40 years old, is one of continuously waking up out of a trance,” Garbus says of the album that was started a few years before the presidential election of 2016 but ended up influenced by it by the time she and her longtime collaborator and bassist Nate Brenner were finished.

“Yes, alarm bells are ringing all the time,” she says of our current politics and culture. “I think that for white America — or I should say, white lefter-wing, liberal, progressive, whatever you want to call it — we’ve been living in a fiction that really benefited us.”

It’s easy to sit back and blame Republicans or conservatives or whomever else for societal ills, Garbus says. But it’s probably not for the best.

“I’m just wary of that fiction,” she says. “I think that’s what the song ‘Coast To Coast’ became about. The idea (that to blame the other side) is keeping me in the same sickness of us against them, and the truth is far deeper and more complex. So how can I always shake that off and look for larger truths?”

At the same time she and Brenner were working on Tune-Yards’ fourth studio album they also started to collaborate with Boots Riley, front man of both the Oakland hip-hop group the Coup, and the rap-rock band Street Sweeper Social Club, on a soundtrack to his 2018 movie “Sorry To Bother You,” a satirical comedy that addresses many of the same issues Garbus tackled in her own songs.

“It’s interesting, you know, because someone at our record label just a little while ago was like, ‘Did you write (“Colonizer”) the song about the white woman’s voice before or after the movie, because there’s all this “white voice” in the film,’” Garbus says. “What’s weird is that it all kind of happened together in this weird way where I’m certain things sunk in because of reading the screenplay.”

Working with Riley was inspiring, Garbus says, from his ability to draw in creative collaborators from their shared hometown of Oakland to his clear-eyed view of film- and music-making.

“It was weird in some ways how overlapping the themes of our album and Boot’s movie were, but no, these are just things that a lot of thinking, creative people that I know are thinking about,” she says.

In addition to the album, the film score, and the tour, Garbus also remains dedicated to her monthly Red Bull Radio show, Tune-Yards present C.L.A.W. – the Collaborative Legions of Artful Womxn, a monthly program that celebrates female identifying musicians.

“Something the radio show allows me to do is to have an excuse first to listen to music, which is something I find kind of hard to find time for, especially when music is every part of my work,” Garbus says. “But it’s been really amazing to have an opportunity to both highlight and then sometimes fund new creations by other women, and primarily women of color.

“I think that’s what I want to be doing,” she says. “If I can find a way to balance whatever Tune-Yards is and will become with being an amplifier of voices that are heard so less often, that feels like some of the best work I could do.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.